Listicle
Encyclopedia
Article (publishing)
An article is a written work published in a print or electronic medium. It may be for the purpose of propagating the news, research results, academic analysis or debate.-News articles:...
. It is generally used in journalism
Journalism
Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues and trends to a broad audience in a timely fashion. Though there are many variations of journalism, the ideal is to inform the intended audience. Along with covering organizations and institutions such as government and...
and blogging to refer to short-form writing that uses a list as its thematic structure, but is fleshed out with sufficient verbiage to be published as an article. A typical listicle will prominently feature a cardinal number
Cardinal number
In mathematics, cardinal numbers, or cardinals for short, are a generalization of the natural numbers used to measure the cardinality of sets. The cardinality of a finite set is a natural number – the number of elements in the set. The transfinite cardinal numbers describe the sizes of infinite...
in its title, such as "10 Ways to Warm Up Your Bedroom in Winter" , or "25 Hairstyles of the Last Hundred Years", with subsequent subheadings within the text itself reflecting this schema.
There are three primary subgenres of listicles:
A ranked one (such as Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone
Rolling Stone is a US-based magazine devoted to music, liberal politics, and popular culture that is published every two weeks. Rolling Stone was founded in San Francisco in 1967 by Jann Wenner and music critic Ralph J...
's "The 100 Best Albums of the Last Twenty Years") implies a qualitative judgement, conveyed by the order of the topics within the text. These are often presented in countdown
Countdown
A countdown is a sequence of counting backward to indicate the seconds, days, or other time units remaining before an event occurs or a deadline expires. Typical events for which a countdown is used include the launch of a rocket or spacecraft, the detonation of a bomb, the start of a race, and the...
order, with the "Number One" item actually being the last in the sequence.
A thematic listicle imparts no such values, instead presenting the topics in whatever order the writer and/or editor deems appropriate.
A random one reflects no structure whatsoever; instead, it embraces an eclectic aesthetic, inviting the reader to assemble one's own conclusions from an array of disparate facts.
While conventional reportage and essay writing often require the careful crafting of narrative flow, the building-block nature of the listicle lends itself to more rapid production. It can also be a means of "recycling" information, as often it is the context, not the content, that is original. For example, a listicle of "Letterman’s 9 Most Hilariously Awkward Moments" can be constructed by adding captions to YouTube
YouTube
YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005, on which users can upload, view and share videos....
clips. For these reasons the form has come under criticism as a “kind of cheap content-creation”:
It's so easy you wonder why everyone doesn't do it until you realize that now it's all they do: Come up with an idea ("Top 10 Worst [X]") on the L train ride to the office that morning, [and] slap together 10 (or 25, or 100) cultural artifacts ripe for the kind of snarky working over that won't actually tax you at all as a writer/thinker.
Anil Dash
Anil Dash is a blogger, entrepreneur and technologist. He is currently the Director of Public Technology Incubator Expert Labs and a partner at ACTIVATE.com, a media & technology consulting firm....
has also disparaged the proliferation of listicles, particularly within the blogosphere
Blogosphere
The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community or as a social network in which everyday authors can publish their opinions...
:
DiggDiggDigg is a social news website. Prior to Digg v4, its cornerstone function consisted of letting people vote stories up or down, called digging and burying, respectively. Digg's popularity prompted the creation of copycat social networking sites with story submission and voting systems...
and delicious and the rest are littered with Top 10s and geek equivalents of Cosmo coverlines. It's not long until we get "21 Ubuntu Install Tips That Will Drive Him Crazy In Bed!"
Nevertheless, the form remains a mainstay of the newsstand and the web. The covers of magazines such as Cosmopolitan
Cosmopolitan (magazine)
Cosmopolitan is an international magazine for women. It was first published in 1886 in the United States as a family magazine, was later transformed into a literary magazine and eventually became a women's magazine in the late 1960s...
and Men’s Journal regularly sport at least one, if not several listicles (see image above). In 2009, postings in the format “25 Random Things About Me" became an internet phenomenon, starting on Facebook
Facebook
Facebook is a social networking service and website launched in February 2004, operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. , Facebook has more than 800 million active users. Users must register before using the site, after which they may create a personal profile, add other users as...
but spreading to the broader web, attracting considerable media coverage in the process . The website Gawker uses "Listicle" as a regular content category. Some websites, such as Listicles.com and Listverse, are devoted almost entirely to the listicle format.